Blogs

I didn't want players to hold own W all the time. I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels the strain after a day of pressing W to go forward! You now tap WS to increase/decrease thrust and the EOT moves along in time. The compass turns along with the camera (clamped to North) and the green arrow shows the track over the ground... although it doesn't seem to take into account camera angle - so I'll fix that next.

I want to be able to support different controls eventually (particularly Xbox type thing). Unity3D takes care of a lot of this out of the box, so as long as I don't use point-and-click solely, it just works.

One problem I have is that it is difficult to tell what control effect you're having on the Cloudship. This has been exacerbated by moving the camera around. The controller will need to tell the player what's going on with the Cloudship. My plan for the controller was to group together similar things: helm, EOT (speed), compass etc on a barrel:

Keeping organised has allowed me to make best use of the limited time I get at my computer. An hour here, an hour there. I can look at videos during lunch break to fill gaps in my understanding so that I can get started more quickly.

I find that if there is a problem with a personal project, then I find it harder to go back to because it's the path of considerable resistance compared to playing Minecraft etc. The Puffy Little Clouds problem I detail below was one of those; I just forced myself to get on with it.

The latest game from Zachtronics Opus Magnum is essentially Space Chem but with a steam punk esthetic and with some slightly different constraints

You use an alchemical engine that consists of moving arms and various modifying runes to take inputs and turn them into a desired output.

It's basically like most Zachtronics games

I'm quite a fan of their work and have enjoyed most of their efforts from space chem to infinifactory even tis-100 and shenzen io (that get quite close to the sort of thing I do for a living but slightly lower level) are quite fun.

My cold, geriatric hands lost grip on my 3.5-year-old HTC One m8 and by doing so demanded that I got a new one.

I've never smashed a smart phone before. I'd dropped my old pre-smart Nokia about a billion times, even dropping from a train window onto a platform but these modern things are delicate and with the blasé attitude of someone who had never dropped a smart phone before, I didn't have a rubber bumper on it.

Fallout 4 is one of my favourite games of recent times I've played it through multiple times on multiple characters with different builds taking the various paths through the game and even so keep finding new stuff or interesting new ways to play in it so when I heard there was going to be a VR version I was very interested.

In Cloudship, the environment has to be an actor. It cannot be passive or visual only, it must affect the choices that the player takes. There are two main parts to it: ground and wind. The ground will be an infinite desert (as per the game) that will hold resources to collect, either in the form of coal deposits or wrecks/flotsam of old Cloudships.